what they really wish for, namely their own good, but is, on the
contrary, promoting it. This feeling in most individuals is much
inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is often wanting
altogether. But to those who have it, it possesses all the
characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their
minds as a superstition of education, or a law despotically imposed by
the power of society, but as an attribute which it would not be well
for them to be without. This conviction is the ultimate sanction of
the greatest happiness morality. This it is which makes any mind, of
well-developed feelings, work with, and not against, the outward
motives to care for others, afforded by what I have called the
external sanctions; and when those sanctions are wanting, or act in an
opposite direction, constitutes in itself a powerful internal
binding force, in proportion to the sensitiveness and thoughtfulness
of the character; since few but those whose mind is a moral blank,
could bear to lay out their course of life on the plan of paying no
regard to others except so far as their own private interest compels.

                               Chapter 4

      Of what sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is Susceptible.

  IT HAS already been remarked, that questions of ultimate ends do not
admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. To be
incapable of proof by reasoning is common to all first principles;
to the first premises of our knowledge, as well as to those of our
conduct. But the former, being matters of fact, may be the subject
of a direct appeal to the faculties which judge of fact- namely, our
senses, and our internal consciousness. Can an appeal be made to the
same faculties on questions of practical ends? Or by what other
faculty is cognisance taken of them?

  Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things
are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is
desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things
being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required
of this doctrine- what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine
should fulfil- to make good its claim to be believed?

  The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible,
is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is
audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our
experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is
possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do
actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes
to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an
end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No
reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except
that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires
his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all
the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to
require, that happiness is a good: that each person's happiness is a
good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to
the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as
one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of
morality.

  But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole
criterion. To do that, it would seem, by the same rule, necessary to
show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never
desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things
which, in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness.
They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence of vice, no less
really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue
is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of
happiness. And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem
that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human
action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of
approbation and disapprobation.

  But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or
maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse.
It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is
to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion
of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue
is made virtue; however they may believe (as they do) that actions and
dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than
virtue; yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from
considerations of this description, what is virtuous, they not only
place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to
the ultimate end, but they also recognise as a psychological fact
the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself,
without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not
in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the
state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love
virtue in this manner- as a thing desirable in itself, even although,
in the individual instance, it should not produce those other
desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of
which it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest
degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The ingredients of
happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself,
and not merely when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle
of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for
instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health,
is to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed
happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and
desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a
part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not
naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of
becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become